THE Bush camp has boxed itself into a corner. The confusion and distress etched on George W. Bush’s face this weekend have infected the efforts to pursue the 25 electoral votes in Florida. And for the first time, there are indications that as a national leader, Bush the Younger might just be as hapless a politician as Bush the Elder was when he was president.

Faced with a ruthless and determined adversary, George W. wanted to take the high road – but had to acknowledge on Saturday that the high road might lead him only from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, back to the governor’s mansion in Austin.

The Bushies watched, amazed, as the Gore forces whipped up a huge dust storm for the benefit of the national media and the media in Florida. Jesse Jackson was given responsibility for the street theater, creating the distasteful spectacle of the man who was once considered among the worst anti-Semites in America comparing the inability of old Jews in Palm Beach County to cast an accurate ballot to the civil-rights struggle in Selma, Alabama.

This sort of talk continued even as we discovered that comparable numbers of ballots in deeply Republican Duval county had been invalidated – not to mention 120,000 ballots in Cook County, where Jackson himself once actually lived.

Meanwhile, Democrats ginned up eight separate lawsuits that former Secretary of State Warren Christopher had the gall to claim on the morning chat shows yesterday were merely legal actions taken by concerned citizens – when we know that Gore lawyers were shopping for judges and taking depositions by the yardful and in general encouraging the infererence of the judicial process.

And so, after days of arguing that deciding the election must not be left up to lawyers, the Bushies blinked and filed suit in federal court. This has led James Baker and the other Bushies to advance a peculiar argument that might best be described as “stop us before we sue again.”

Baker and the Bushies make the inarguable point that machine ballots were never intended to be counted by human hands, and that there is no way to impose uniform standards on a manual recount. But by doing so, they weaken in the court of public opinon what is sure to be their best option if the federal court does not find in their favor today – a call for a full manual recount in all 67 counties in Florida to ensure at least a modicum of consistency in the way the state’s 6 million votes are tallied.

Baker’s last political job was as White House chief of staff in the last months of Bush the Elder’s administration. That administration was afflicted in its final 18 months with the kind of short-sighted political arrogance evident in the closing week of his son’s presidential campaign, with Bush taking a national victory lap and chief strategist Karl Rove predicting a 5-point win and an electoral landslide.

Bush the Elder believed the nation couldn’t possibly prefer a draft-dodging philanderer to a World War II hero who had led America to victory in Desert Storm, and so coasted for a year as the nation dipped into recession. Baker and the new Bushies believed the 1,700-vote margin in the initial Florida count would be determinative, and sat back as the Gore forces took the initiative.

As a result, they are now on the political and logical defensive. I wrote a book about the Bush failure in 1992 called “Hell of a Ride.” Little did I know back in 1993 what the truly hellish ride for the Bush family and the country was going to be.